Technology

Friday went poorly for a select group of Twitter users that have earned a reputation for their expertise at gaming the system. The social media company moved to suspend a number of popular accounts with millions of followers between them, Buzzfeed reports. Their offense? Stealing people’s tweets without credit and conspiring as a group to share tweets — their own, and ...

Snapchat and Instagram have temporarily removed their Giphy GIF sticker features after users saw an extremely racist GIF as an option to add to their images. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again . . . while we ...

A study of 126,000 rumours and false news stories spread on Twitter over a period of 11 years found that they travelled faster and reached more people than the truth. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also found that fake news was more commonly re-tweeted by humans than bots. They said it could be because fake news tends to ...

Former US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are in talks to produce shows for Netflix, according to the New York Times. The couple would make exclusive content for the US streaming site focused on uplifting stories, the paper suggested. If confirmed, the deal would give a global platform for the Obamas, bypassing mainstream US media such as Fox ...

Owners of Oculus Rift headsets could not use their devices for almost a day due to an administrative oversight. Oculus failed to renew a security certificate for some software, meaning headsets would not run key code. Security certificates are often used to authenticate software, and many computers refuse to run code lacking valid credentials. Oculus issued a software update early ...

Google has confirmed that it is allowing the Pentagon to use some of its image recognition technologies as part of a military project. The disclosure follows a report by Gizmodo, which said the artificial intelligence tech was being used to analyse drone footage. The news site said that many of the search giant’s workers only learned of the collaboration last ...

A UK company has been linked to the laundering of 650,000 stolen bitcoins worth £4.5bn, a BBC Radio 4 investigation has found. The coins were taken by hackers from Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, leaving tens of thousands of customers out of pocket. It’s not clear who is in control of the London-based firm Always Efficient LLP. Mt Gox operator ...

US President Donald Trump is to meet video games company representatives on Thursday to discuss violent content. The meeting comes in the wake of last month’s shooting at a school in Florida in which 17 people died. The president has in the past expressed the view that violent games were “shaping young people’s thoughts”. But the games industry has defended ...

A UK company has been linked to the laundering of 650,000 stolen bitcoins worth £4.5bn, a BBC Radio 4 investigation has found. The coins were taken by hackers from Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, leaving tens of thousands of customers out of pocket. It’s not clear who is in control of the London-based firm Always Efficient LLP. Mt Gox operator Mark Karpeles ...

The Open Rights Group says it fears a data breach is “inevitable” as the deadline approaches for a controversial change in the way people in the UK access online pornography. Details of an age verification tool developed by a major porn site owner were revealed at the weekend. From April 2018, porn site visitors in the UK will have to ...